The South (and the nation, too, though he was a true Southerner in the best senses of the term) was diminished today with the sudden death by heart attack of the Nashville-based writer John Egerton. We at NewSouth were privileged to know John and work with him for several decades, first through the Southern Regional Council, and later as the publisher of an insightful collections of essays, Where We Stand (2004), to which he contributed, and his wickedly satiric comic novel takedown of George W. Bush, Ali Dubya and the Forty Thieves (2006).

Those were only two of his many books about the South, not to mention the thousands of articles and reports he produced about the region over a long career of fearless and inspired writing about civil rights, education, politics, the courts, and history and culture. In his later career, he became especially known as a writer on food and he was a primary inspiration for the group of Southern cooks, writers, and filmmakers who coalesced around the Southern Foodways organization. See John’s obituary in the Tennessean newspaper and the New York Times.

One who knew John even better than we did is another NewSouth author, Steve Suitts (Hugo Black of Alabama, 2005), the long-time executive director of the Southern Regional Council and current vice president of the Southern Education Foundation. On learning of John’s death today, Steve remembered his old friend and colleague with these words:

Anyone who wants to know about the struggles for school desegregation and racial justice in the South in the 1960s and 1970s will come across at least one of the many essays, articles and reports that John Egerton authored. He was never a reporter for any of the major national newspapers but was perhaps the last full time, freelance journalist who covered the civil rights movement of that era. He wrote reports and essays for the Southern Education Foundation and the Southern Regional Council, as well as articles in national magazines, that brought statistical patterns and data to life and exposed the mendacity, insanity, and cruelty of Southern segregation and racism. He was a lone voice among the white writers who lived, travelled, and worked in the South without the institutional support and protection of a national magazine or newspaper. But John always appreciated that white Southerners had within them the capacity to change themselves and the region for the better. As was said of the freelance Southern writer Lillian Smith in her era, John Egerton in his era loved the South so much he wanted to make it better.

John is known in many circles. He has a bevy of books and articles about the white people of Appalachia. He wrote an amazing fictional story for NewSouth Books. He was the author of the notion of the Dixiefication of America. He is an icon among those who write seriously about Southern food. He was the go-to man who for almost two decades brought together the Southern journalists who covered the South during the decades of struggles for civil rights as the “Popham Seminar,” named for his old friend, Johnny Popham (known to many as “Pop”). John took all the time in the world driving “Pop” around the South in his later years and tending to the needs of others, including his dear old friend, the legendary Rev. Will Campbell. Amid his incredible productive years of writing, John never sought a spotlight, never failed to give more credit to others than to himself, and never was too busy to be a good husband, good father, and good friend to many.

One of John’s lasting contributions to understanding the South was his book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, published in 1994. More than any other of his many works, this title, taken from William Faulkner, was the one John really cherished. For it capture John’s own motto of life and his enduring hope for the region he loved — to have everyone in the South ready with the courage, persistence, and devotion to speak truth to and about those who are powerful, hateful, or in the moment’s ruling majority on behalf of those human values that always placed John and his voice on the right side of Southern history and now places him among the angels.

John Egerton was 78. His was a long and extraordinarily productive life, but today it seems far too short considering the contributions he still would have made to the rest of us and to his region and country. He was a really decent man, and the greatest undiscovered — in a mass-market sense — writer and reporter of his generation.

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Citrus roasted turkey, kale and collards salad, and stuffing-stuffed onions are just some of the savory treats you’ll find on Alabama cheesemaker Tasia Malakasis’s Thanksgiving table — and of course, she has a carrot cake with delectable goat cheese frosting, too.

Tasia’s Thanksgiving table, including place settings, guest favors, kids’ plates, and more are spotlighted in a new feature in Southern Living magazine. Tasia is the owner of the award-winning Belle Chevre fromagerie in Alabama; she is also the author of Tasia’s Table, a collection of Tasia’s favorite recipes inspired by her Southern and Greek heritages. Among Tasia’s Thanksgiving decoration suggestions are to “keep your table simple and timeless by topping silver chargers with white plates. Layer an oversize linen napkin between the plates to add natural texture.”

Read about Tasia’s “Fresh & Modern Thanksgiving Table Setting” at the Southern Living website.

Tasia’s Table: Cooking with the Artisan Cheesemaker at Belle Chevre is available in hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

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In the aftermath of the Civil War, approximately 500 African Americans left the Chattahoochee Valley of north Georgia and Alabama to make new lives in the West African Republic of Liberia. Though some returned to the United States after the hardships they faced trying to settle a new land, many stayed and some even prospered.

Historical records about the emigrants’ experiences are limited, but historian Matthew McDaniel has managed to piece together new insights into their experiences, using demographic data from the American Colonization Society (ACS), emigrant correspondence from the ACS journal, and also correspondence printed in local newspapers at that time. The result is a greater picture of these emigrants than has been offered before.

In a feature in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, genealogist Kenneth Thomas calls McDaniel’s book, Emigration to Liberia, From the Chattahoochee Valley of Georgia and Alabama, 1853-1903, a “fascinating story … well worth reading.”

Thomas also praises the book’s appendix, which lists the names of almost all the emigrants to Liberia. “This list could help clarify what happened to someone’s lost relatives,” Thomas notes, making Emigration to Liberia a key title both for historians and those interested in African American genealogy.

Read “Book looks at emigration to Liberia” at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website.

Emigration to Liberia by Matthew McDaniel is available in paperback and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

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A new video and a podcast interview with attorney Fred Gray complement the release of the newly revised edition of Gray’s memoir, Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System. During the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement, Gray served as the lawyer for Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks; he also argued in cases involving school desegregations, and helped bring about a presidential apology for victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

A video of Gray’s September presentation at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum is available online from C-SPAN2; an interview with Gray on John Seigenthaler’s Words on Words program can be downloaded as an MP3.

At the Carter Library, Gray described his book to the audience as “a history of the Civil Rights Movement as it begun in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955, spreading throughout the state, throughout the country.” He continued, “The effects [of the Civil Rights Movement] went around the world. Almost every civil rights event that has occurred since 1955 — to some degree — you can trace a great deal of it back to Montgomery, Alabama.” Gray’s memoir details these integral events in Montgomery, including the arrests of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Gray’s speech aired on C-SPAN2′s Book TV and is available for viewing online.

On John Seigenthaler’s Words on Words, originally aired on October 27 on Nashville Public Radio, Seigenthaler and Gray look at the revised edition of Bus Ride to Justice‘s new revelations about Rosa Parks’s arrest and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the book, Gray reveals that he and Parks, a secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, spent many weeks discussing how to use an arrest as a way to push for change in Montgomery.

“We really couldn’t completely pre-plan it,” Gray tells Seigenthaler, since they couldn’t predict when buses would be full and when Parks might be asked to give up her seat, “but what we did know and what Ms. Parks understood was that she would be an ideal person if the opportunity [for protest] presented itself.” Gray goes on to say that “Ms. Parks was the key person and she wanted to take her place in history and she did, not by accident. … The whole thing to a degree was planned in the sense that we were prepared.”

John Seigenthaler’s C-SPAN2; an interview with Gray on John Seigenthaler’s Words on Words interview with Fred Gray, including a discussion of the photographs included in the book, is available as an audio podcast.

The revised edition of Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System by Fred Gray, is available as a hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

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Jeffrey Benton edits local history titles for NewSouth Books; he is also the author of the newly released Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama. He was inspired to compile a list of books about Montgomery in completing the writing of his own book. Jeff writes:

When I was looking over the bibliography of Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery for one last time before the book went to the printer, it occurred to me that there are a respectable number of books about Montgomery. Although there is no definitive history of the city, Mary Ann Neeley’s The Works of Matthew Blue, Montgomery’s First Historian fulfills this role for the city’s early history.

Scores of more specialized books fill in the intervening years up to the present. Personally, I’ve use many of these books in writing more than 250 newspaper articles on local history. So I was inspired to compile a list of books on the city and its environs with the hope that others may find local history more accessible. I forwarded the list to the main Montgomery County Library and to NewSouth Books. The latter, of course, has made this list available on its website. I am grateful to NewSouth Books for having done so and assume that others who want to appreciate and understand the city will also be grateful.

View the “Selected Books About Montgomery, Alabama” reading list on the NewSouth website. Jeff Benton’s latest book, Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama, is available now.

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Jeff Benton, known for his “Montgomery Portraits” features in the Montgomery Advertiser, has written another; this time, it’s a portrait of how antebellum Montgomerians spent their leisure time. Benton’s new book is Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery, available now. Benton is also the subject himself of a recent feature in the Advertiser.

Though “leisure time” is often a foreign concept in the modern world, the antebellum Montgomerians faced a real cultural shift in determining how to spend their time now that rising prosperity meant they no longer always had to work for food, writes Allison Griffin in the feature on Benton and his book in the Advertiser, “Lives of Leisure.” The antebellum Montgomerians considered not only how to spend their time, but also what activities were “respectable” for the burgeoning middle class.

Benton tells Griffin that this new middle class were “work-oriented, moral, and very interested in respectability.” While they might often emulate the activities of the upper class, there were certain forms of entertainment, like dancing, that the upper class enjoyed and the middle class eschewed. The middle class’s struggle to determine how to spend their leisure time was in fact a struggle to decide how to define themselves.

Read more about Jeff Benton and Respectable and Disreputable from the Montgomery Advertiser.

Jeff Benton signs Respectable and Disreputable:
Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery
at the Capitol Book and News bookstore, October 22, 2013.

Jeff Benton’s exploration of antebellum Montgomery follows his previous three books about Montgomery and Alabama. He is a retired Air Force colonel who has taught history and English at the University of Maryland Far East Division, The Citadel, the Air War College, and across Alabama. Benton edits local history titles for NewSouth Books.

Respectable and Disreputable is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

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Rod Davis’s forthcoming South, America is being compared to the works of James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane, and described as “a powerful evocation of pre-Katrina New Orleans and as absorbing a tale of love and evil to come out of this town since Ace Atkins and Tony Dunbar.” The soul-searching and trouble-finding protagonist, ex-TV reporter Jack Prine, was once an Army intelligence officer in Korea and it shows in both his skills and his penchant for taking risks.

It’s no accident that Davis, himself a veteran of Korea during the Vietnam Era, stays involved in advocacy and remains interested in the fates of those who have left the military. In the September issue of The Texas Observer, Davis shows that interest in his review of Making War at Fort Hood by Kenneth MacLeish, a fascinating study of the true effects of military service on those whose lives are forever changed by it.

Rod Davis’s South, America will be released by NewSouth Books in December. While you wait, don’t miss Davis’s debut novel, the PEN Southwest fiction award-winning Corina’s Way, which Kirkus Reviews called a “spicy bouillabaisse, New Orleans-set … romp, told in an old-fashioned style and with traditional southern charm.”

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Anniston Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers’s explores “the making of a Southern liberal” in his new memoir, In Love with Defeat. To some, a “Southern liberal” might be an oxymoron, something Ayers discusses in his book and that two new reviews of In Love with Defeat have picked up on.

In a review that aired on North Carolina Bookwatch, D.G. Martin points out that Ayers’s “progressive views set him apart from many of his fellow Southerners, whose culture and basic values he respects and shares. At the same time, this attachment to his Southern heritage sets him apart from non-Southerners who share his basic political views but cannot understand his attachment to the positive features of Southern culture.”

It is this dichotomy that Edwin Yoder also notes in a Weekly Standard review, that “as the great historian C. Vann Woodward taught us, the South is incurably peculiar—’un-American’ in the sense that its scarred history often negates the nation’s positive myths of victory and optimism. Its collective identity is marked by atypical experiences of poverty, defeat, and racial evil. … What Ayers means by a love of defeat is that his political and cultural tribe of Southern liberals (impatient with Jim Crow and bent on overthrowing its evils) were born to incompleteness.”

As an example, Yoder cites the formation of the L. Q. C Lamar Society by Ayers and others, intending to preserve the South’s cultural legacy while attracting new business opportunities to the South. They were ultimately overwhelmed, as Ayers describes in In Love with Defeat, by progress that eroded Southern culture; Ayers compares the thoroughly modern Atlanta to Charleston and Savannah that still preserve the Southern aesthetic.

Martin spotlights the end of Ayers’s book, in which the author “is still caught between his liberal leanings and his identification with Southerners who do not share those views. … Maybe it is a tough puzzle to understand, but [as] former Mississippi Gov. William Winter says, Ayers comes ‘as close to explaining who we Southerners are and why we act as we do,’” even if that explanation comes in the form of recognizing the contradictions inherit in the Southern identity.

Writes Yoder, “Brandt Ayers is one of those notable heirs of the knight of La Mancha, resolved to better his world, heedless of cynicism. If this was in some ways an impossible dream, he stuck to his mission, and Anniston, Alabama, the South, and the nation are the better for it.”

Read D.G. Martin’s review, archived in the Charlotte Observer, and Edwin Yoder’s review from the Weekly Standard.

In Love with Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal by H. Brandt Ayers, is available in hardcover and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

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NewSouth Books announces with sadness the passing of Sheldon Hackney, whose life and work inspired a new book — a “festschrift” called Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney, due out in November.

One of the volume’s editors, Ray Arsenault, and one of the essay contributors, Charles Joyner, each sent these tributes to their friend and mentor.

“Sheldon Hackney died this morning, September 12, at the age of 79, at his home in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. He is now at peace, surrounded by his loving family — his wife Lucy, his son Fain and daughter-in-law Melissa, his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Brian, and his eight grandchildren. Some of Sheldon’s colleagues and former students have been preparing a volume of essays in his honor — a volume that will be published late next month. Sheldon knew about this effort and seemed to take great pleasure from it. Last night Pat Sullivan was able to visit with Sheldon and to show him an advance copy of the cover and the introductory chapter that profiles his remarkable life. Perhaps we can take some comfort in knowing that this brought a smile to his face–and that he surely had some sense of how much we love and admire him. Peace to his spirit.”

– Ray Arsenault, editor, Dixie Redux, John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

“Sheldon’s scholarship, his teaching and his leadership left an extraordinary legacy. Many make a mark in one of those, some in two, but few in all three. It has be our privilege to be his students (whether in the classroom or on the page) and to share his friendship. I am saddened at his death, but here on the edge of the Atlantic I look out at the horizon and think of what someone said at my father’s funeral many years ago: On this side of the horizon, we are lamenting ‘there he goes, but on the other side of the horizon they are smiling ‘here he comes.’”

– Charles Joyner, Burroughs Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University

Sheldon Hackney’s book The Politics of Presidential Appointment is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is available for pre-order from NewSouth Books. The 19 contributors, all distinguished historians, include Arsenault and co-editor Orville Vernon Burton, Joyner, and Drew Gilpin Faust, William R. Ferris, Lani Guinier, Steven Hahn, Randall Kennedy, J. Morgan Kousser, Peyton McCrary, Stephanie McCurry, James M. McPherson, David Moltke-Hansen, Michael O’Brien, Thomas Sugrue, Patricia Sullivan, and J. Mills Thornton.

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Chapter 16 calls writer and professor Gerald Duff’s new short ebook Fugitive Days “a witty insight into the real lives” of some notable poets, and the Southern Literary Review calls Fugitive Days “a wry contribution to the growing literature of writers’ encounters with writers.”

In Fugitive Days, Duff recounts his personal encounters with Vanderbilt University’s Fugitive poets, including Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle. As reviewer Ed Tarkington writes in Chapter 16, an online publication from Humanities Tennessee:

Some of these sketches seem intent on demystifying their subjects. We see Robert Penn Warren smearing butter on a dinner roll, musing on how one can detect from the butter’s taste what the cow last ate before the cream was produced, Allen Tate conferring with his young colleague about how best to engage Vanderbilt undergraduates in Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Andrew Lytle reciting a dubious anecdote about a visit to his New York publishing house, etc. The subtext, however, is the journey of [Duff,] a new-minted scholar as he finds his way, eager to spend any moment he can in the company of his heroes. …

In one anecdote, Duff arrives early at Ransom’s home to drive Warren to the airport, hoping to steal a few extra minutes in the company of both great men. On a different occasion, driving down Thompson Lane with Lytle in the passenger seat, he slows the car so as not to arrive at his destination before Lytle finishes telling his story.

In the Southern Literary Review, reviewer David Madden observes that “some of [Duff's] encounters were learning experiences, some were sad, some were disillusioning. Long relationships with such writers often diminish the anecdotal impact, while brief ones are often so vivid, the memory lingers over many years, as did Duff’s, and one finally scratches the itch to tell waiting listeners about them.”

Madden concludes that “Duff is a very witty, vivid writer, whose essay will inspire … other writers to come forward with their repertoire of encounters with literary heroes.” Tarkington notes that “the final effect of [Fugitive Days] is to emphasize Duff’s heartfelt reverence for a group of men who revolutionized the practice of both poetry and literary criticism, and who brought to the South the artistic and intellectual credibility that paved the way for Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, and their heirs.”

Read David Madden’s review at the Southern Literary Review website. Read “All the Fugitives’ Men” from Chapter 16.

Gerald Duff’s Fugitive Days is available for just $0.99 for Kindle, Nook, iPad, or your favorite ebook device. Duff’s novel Coasters and his short story collection Fire Ants are also available in hardcover and ebook.

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